Hi, mostly i use REHL based distros like Centos/Rocky/Oracle for the solutions i develop but it seems its time to leave…
What good server/minimal distro you use ?
Will start to test Debian stable.
Desktop? Arch. Server? Debian, NixOS.
I would recommend openSuSe. It is using rpm, but it is an independent distribution.
Until it is clear, how Leap 16 will look like, I would not start to use it now.
I’m a long time Opensuse user
but that is also somewhat RedHat based I think. Highly recommend it, though. Have been using it on a server since 2014 and just kept updating through all the opensuse versions since then without problems. Exceptionally stable.Also use it on my work laptop and I’m also with that very satisfied regarding stability and usability.
Edit: it’s based on Slackware and not redhat.
On my Desktop, I switched to Manjaro (Arch-based) from Mint a few years ago. Works like a charm and I like the rolling release model. On servers, Ubuntu, Debian or SUSE might be a good choice.
If your solutions are work/job related and need to be distributed I think your current options are SUSE or Debian. If your solution is something only you maintain, you could check out NixOS.
One of my work colleagues actually uses Nix on Debian to distribute a piece of software. Though it is software made for a hardware appliance so that’s a bit special.
Honestly, unless you’re using Nix within something like docker images (Nix has great support for writing really minimal docker images) or use it to just build software (which is also a great use-case), I would rather go straight to NixOS, in my experience it’s a smoother experience than using Nix on a different distro and e.g. services (like standalone home-manager) .
He didn’t want to make unfamiliar users have a hard time on the management part of the system. If it’s just debian then everyone knows how to install syslog forwarding or logrotate or python or whatever they might need to manage the appliance in their environment.
My vote is Archlinux. Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes and upgrading from oldstable to stable always comes with manual intervention.
Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.
Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.
Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.
You basically recommend to burn money.
Not because of Arch itself and its quality, but because you need to constantly monitor the mailing list for issues and you need to plan a lot more downtimes due to reboot. This is not gonna happen in businesses.
if you need reliable uptime you are in need of redundant servers and at that point you can just apply updates and reboot the servers concurrently
Businesses rely on stable server and applications. Stable in the sense of API/ABI stable. You want an application behave exactly the same on day one and on the last day before eol of the server OS.
Arch is pure chaos and it could completely change how things work and break commercial third party apps on that server on potentially every day. And you would not necessarily notice the error until its to late and your data is corrupted.
You don’t trow money at a your server infrastructure to get redundant servers to finally be able to use Arch somewhat stable. And why should a business not use that redundancy for an LTS distro to get even more stability and safety of operations.
Regarding the kernel upgrades: Using the linux-lts package / kernel get’s you a pretty reliable setup.
